Untitled

-Alan one shot

pairing - Alan x girl!reader

word count - 1.5k+

genre - cyber-noir. slight dark romance

warnings: stalking. kind of obsessive. Second-Person Limited POV

The first time Alan saw you, it was an accident. Or at least, that was the lie he repeated to himself whenever the memory resurfaced. He had been deployed to monitor a high-risk transaction near an old internet café, in between a neon-lit convenience store and a narrow, grime-slicked alleyway. It was nothing glamorous, just another normal, data-driven errand for the IKFC. Another day spent rotting behind encrypted networks, drowning in blue light and code.

Then you collided with him.

Books scattered across the wet pavement, the loud thud echoing in the quiet air. A leather-bound notebook slid across the concrete, coming to a dead stop beneath his shoe.

"Oh—I'm so sorry!"

Your voice was soft. Too soft for a neighborhood that basically ran on illegal businesses. You immediately dropped to your knees, gathering your things with frantic, hurried movements. Strands of hair fell loose, covering your face as you tried desperately to collect the mess before causing any more trouble.

Alan just stared. Not because you were beautiful—though, you were. But mostly because you looked entirely different to the world he lived in. There was no blood on your collar. No smell of cordite or desperation clinging to your skin. You didn’t look like you belonged to the underground fights, the heavy hush of syndicates, or the web of systemic lies he spun for a living. You were just a girl carrying books.

When you finally stood, clutching the heavy stack tightly against your chest like a shield, you bowed your head slightly.

"Sorry again," you murmured. Then you turned and left.

Somehow, Alan found himself rooted to the spot, watching your shadows shrink and disappear down the length of the gray alley.

A week later, he knew where you bought your coffee. Two weeks later, he knew which bookstore you visited every Thursday. Three weeks later, he knew the exact layout of the apartment building you lived in.

It wasn't difficult. Digital tracking wasn't just a skillset for Alan; it was practically second nature. It took a few security cameras, a handful of hacked traffic feeds, and a light skim through poorly secured public databases. Nothing complicated. No masterclass required.

The terrifying part wasn't how effortless it was. The terrifying part was how often he found himself doing it.

Every single day became another excuse to slip into your life. Just one more look, he’d tell himself. Just one more byte of data. Just one more confirmation that you are exactly what you appear to be.

Kind. Quiet. Normal. Everything Alan wasn't.

Sometimes, when the compulsion grew too heavy to fight, he would park his sedan across the street from your building. With his laptop balanced precariously on his knees, he would sit in the stifling dark, watching the amber lights flicker on and off behind your sheer curtains. He never approached you. He never spoke to you again. He just watched, observed, and compiled. Like you were another target. Another file to be closed. Another asset to neutralize.

Yet, for some reason, the air in his lungs always felt different when your name was on his screen.

But then the rhythm of his obsession began to crack.

Whenever Alan followed you through crowded subway stations or open places, you would glance over your shoulder. Not once. Not twice. Every single time. Sometimes you would stop abruptly in front of a storefront window, your eyes tracking the reflection of the crowd. Sometimes you would turn your head directly toward the shadow where he was.

Every single time, Alan’s rational mind convinced him it was mere coincidence. Human paranoia. A fluke.

Until he noticed the most unsettling detail of all. You never looked scared. You only looked... aware. As if you didn't just feel a pair of eyes on your back—you were measuring the distance between them.

One rainy evening, the discipline Alan prided himself on finally snapped under the weight of temptation.

He sat deep in the driver's seat of his car beneath a flickering, broken streetlamp. The windshield was a smeared canvas of rain and distorted neon. Across the asphalt, your apartment building loomed, casting long, fractured shadows.

His laptop screen flared to life, a stark, pale glow against the interior darkness. A few calculated keystrokes. A few custom scripts. A few backdoors bypassed. Within seconds, your home Wi-Fi network materialized on his scanner.

Alan’s lips curved into a cold, arrogant smirk. "Let's see who you really are."

His fingers danced across the mechanical keyboard, a fluid, lethal rhythm. Within three minutes, he had breached the router’s first firewall layer. Then the second. Then—

ACCESS DENIED.

His smirk disappeared.

A second warning aggressively hijacked the terminal window.

UNAUTHORIZED CONNECTION DETECTED.

Alan's jaw tightened. His fingers blurred across the keyboard, moving faster, harder. He punched in a zero-day exploit, trying another route. Another script. Another bypass.

Nothing worked.

Instead, the terminal window violently collapsed, and his entire screen suddenly flashed a hostile, blinding red.

UNKNOWN USER TRACING CONNECTION.

"What?" Alan muttered under his breath, his eyes widening.

This was impossible. No one should have noticed. Especially not you.

The trace bar on the bottom of his monitor began to load, bleeding across the screen. It was fast. Ridiculously fast. Whoever was operating on the other side of that civilian network wasn't just defending their home turf; they knew exactly what they were doing, executing a reverse-handshake protocol with terrifying efficiency.

His pulse quickened, a heavy drumming in his ears.

Before he could even attempt to hard-kill the power to his machine, a brand-new command prompt forced its way to the foreground of his monitor. The crimson warnings vanished, replaced by a pitch-black window and a single, solitary line of clean, white text.

Stop snooping.

Absolute, suffocating silence filled the car.

Alan stared at the two words, his chest completely frozen. His eyes widened as the realization crashed down on him.

Upstairs, you sat cross-legged on your bed, your face illuminated by the soft, pale glow of your laptop screen.

You had known someone was there for weeks. You had felt the heavy weight of a gaze in the crowds, noticed the faint, repetitive flicker of a gray sedan parked just a little too perfectly in the shadows of the broken streetlamp. You weren’t helpless. You weren’t some fragile girl oblivious to the wolves. You had just been waiting for him to make his move.

Suddenly, a localized alert pinged on your hidden monitor.

ALERT: INBOUND PACKET INJECTION DETECTED.

Your lips curved slightly. Finally.

You watched your custom firewalls take the hit. Whoever this was, he was clean. He bypassed the first layer like it was tissue paper, sliding through the second with a terrifying, military-grade efficiency that would have panicked anyone else. But you had built this honey-pot network specifically to catch someone exactly like him.

Your fingers met the keyboard, moving with absolute, unhurried precision. You didn't scramble; you orchestrated.

With a single command, you locked down the core directory.

ACCESS DENIED.

You watched his IP scramble, executing an advanced zero-day exploit to force another entry. He was fast. Lethal, even. But you were already ten steps ahead, trapping his connection in a digital mirror maze. You executed a reverse-handshake protocol, forcing his terminal to feed its data straight back to you.

INITIATING REVERSE TRACE.

Lines of green and crimson code flooded your screen, mapping his exact location, his machine specs, his signature. You watched his digital panic manifest in the erratic stutter of his keystrokes as he realized his ghost story was tracing him back.

You opened his terminal remotely. You didn't steal his files. You didn't fry his hard drive. You just let out a slow, quiet sigh, typed a short sentence, and hit enter.

"There you are."

You didn't write another line of code. You didn't need to. The point had been made.

Slowly, you stood from your bed, leaving your laptop open on the mattress. The room remained dark, save for the rhythmic, heavy patter of the rain lashing against the glass panes. You walked toward your bedroom window and looked outside.

Directly at his car.

Not vaguely toward the street. Not accidentally scanning the block. Directly.

Your gaze locked entirely onto the dark, tinted windshield of his sedan. You stood unmoving. Certain. Knowing.

Inside the car, Alan felt his stomach violently tighten into a knot of ice. There was absolutely no logical way you could see him. The parking spot had been meticulously chosen—angled perfectly to blend into the parking lot, close enough to observe.

Yet you were staring straight through the glass, straight into his chest. As if you’d known the make and model of his vehicle from day one. As if you’d been waiting for him to finally knock on your digital door.

Slowly, almost mechanically, Alan lowered his laptop. The distant amber glow from your bedroom window reflected perfectly in his dilated pupils.

And for the first time since you had collided on that rainy pavement... He wasn't the one in control.

High above, you tilted her head slightly. It was a silent, mocking challenge. No fear. No panic. No confusion. Just a piercing, calculated look that stripped him bare across the distance.

I know you're there.

Alan couldn't breathe. He couldn't look away. Because in that suffocating, rain-drenched moment, a dangerous realization settled into his bones.

The girl he’d been quietly studying for weeks... Had been studying him too.